How a Global Participatory Grantmaking Experiment in Seed Funding Took Shape

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Esperande Bigirimana knows the cost of silence. She grew up in Burundi, where at age 13, she was raped during the civil war. She understood the price she would pay if she spoke out. She would be unmarriageble, shunned, blamed. So she learned to stay silent and accept what happened as her fault. She eventually moved to South Africa to start fresh, but when she sought out healing through her church, the stigma of sexual violence remained. Eventually, though, she began to speak out about her experience. 

Today, with a master’s degree in hand, Bigirimana is cofounder of the global Phephisa Survivor Network and administrator of the Phephisa Survivor Network in South Africa. 

“You may be alone,” Bigirimana told me, “but if you turn on your light others will come.” And come they did, by the hundreds, survivors like herself, stigmatized and suffering from deep depression.

Starting with just four women sharing their stories, her efforts have grown an impressive network of nearly 300 women in 22 groups across Africa focused on providing a safe space for healing and mobilizing leaders, especially faith leaders, in support. 

They work with survivors of some of the worst abuse one can imagine. And yet, despite filing grant proposal after grant proposal, the network was unable to get funding. Repeated rejections meant something was clearly amiss, but they had no idea where the problem lay. Bigirimana was told she could partner with a large organization, but feared the women would lose their voice, in clear contradiction of their purpose.

Her negative experience with funders moved Bigirimana to participate in the Gender Equity Seed Fund, a new participatory grantmaking experiment by the Imago Dei Fund, which invests in advancing gender equity with a lens on the deeply detrimental impacts of patriarchy in religion. 

“There are so many contradictions right out of the gate when one sets out to do philanthropy in a world with such deeply rooted systemic injustice,” said Emily Nielsen Jones, who cofounded the Imago Dei Fund in 2009 with her husband, Ross. “Our own brains can be a bottleneck.” Other women’s funds like the Global Fund for Women and the Boston Women’s Fund that engage donors and community leaders in shared decision-making “shaped my philanthropic impulses early on,” she said. Imago Dei has sought to shift more of its funding to locally led organizations and experiment with funding through intermediaries who are closer to the problems being addressed. 

Nielsen Jones is particularly interested in “a real blindspot” for funders: seed funding. “A little money goes a long way in the early stages of a vision coming into being,” she says, but such funding is often out of reach, even “when there is a lot of inspiration.” 

A co-creation committee comes together

To design a working structure for its new Gender Equity Seed Fund, Imago Dei turned to a unique fellowship it launched in 2021 called The Girl Child Long Walk to Freedom. There have been two cohorts so far, 28 fellows from 17 countries — including myself. We all share an interest in issues around patriarchy and gender, and committed to a year-long, very deep and often disturbing dive into the world of faith-based patriarchy, with the goal to better understand and address the tangled contradictions of gender and faith. Many of the fellows also bring with them smart and innovative projects that require small budgets, making it an excellent seed fund laboratory.

Nielsen Jones knew the participatory grantmaking process can be time-intensive and can “go off the rails” if not well designed. She turned to Marie-Rose Romain Murphy, senior project consultant to the fellowship, who has a sharp global perspective and is deeply passionate about marginalized communities. Romain Murphy created a structured plan to hammer out the grant process, then turned to the fellows for volunteers to form a co-creation committee. Four of us raised our hands.

Kate Kiama is based in Nairobi, Kenya. Kiama is director of programs and impact at She’s the First, which provides flexible funding to grassroots organizations that empower girls to be their own best advocates in their homes, schools and communities, because girls often aren’t invited into the rooms where decisions that affect them are made. Kiama said she was “excited to be invited to have a seat at the table,” and hoped “more funders can learn from this as well.” 

Humphrey Nabimanya is based in Kampala, Uganda. Nabimanya is the founder and CEO of Reach A Hand Uganda, focused on youth empowerment programs with an emphasis on sexual reproductive health and rights, HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention. Like Bigirimana, his fight is personal. He experienced discrimination and stigma growing up because he was raised by HIV-positive guardians.

I’m based in the U.S. I created a global advocacy project called Faiths for Safe Water — among its focuses is the global lack of access to safe water and sanitation, a devastating burden on the lives and health of women and girls. 

In addition to her work with Phephisa, Bigirimana is on the management team of We Will Speak Out South Africa, which mobilizes the faith sector against sexual violence. She admits she wasn’t sure what to expect of Imago Dei’s new effort to seek our outside opinions. At our first meeting, when she said, “no one ever asked me,” that really caught my attention. Bigirimana highlighted how rarely nonprofit leaders are asked for input about how philanthropy sets priorities. For me, she set the tone — and the challenge — for what was to come.

Nielsen Jones deliberately stepped aside and her brother-in-law, Andrew Jones, who serves as the foundation’s impact partner, rounded out the co-creation committee with a gentle hand. 

Building trust across 10 time zones

Romain Murphy felt strongly that our space must embody mutual trust, calling it “an essential step that people tend not to invest enough time in.” At the start of each Zoom meeting, we took time to share what was going on in our lives, and while my instinct was to roll my eyes, it turned out that this time felt well spent. By building trust, the floor felt open and grounded, and our thoughtful conversations felt a far cry from, dare I say it, the nonprofit navel-gazing we too often experience.

The goals were comprehensive: Articulate the seed fund’s core values, create eligibility parameters, create an appropriate application process, develop evaluation criteria and select a grant review committee made up of foundation staff and fellowship participants. And though the Imago Dei program team would review what we created and offer feedback, Imago Dei was clear that our co-creation committee would have the final say on the new seed fund’s structure.

“Philanthropists need to know that you cannot say that you are committed to [participatory grantmaking] and want to continue to lead the process,” Romain Murphy says. “As much as it can be difficult for them as 'power yielders,' philanthropists must adopt the role of servant leaders and let go of their usual control. It is not easy, and frankly, it's a lesson for not just for philanthropists, but for anyone of us who has power and influence, including community leaders.”

Funding as a two-way street

Our co-creation committee began by looking backward before looking forward, focusing on our good and bad experiences with funders. From the grantee side, it can be summed up in three words: feedback, feedback, feedback.

Good experiences included: clear process, reasonable documentation, requests for applications only from those likely to be funded, and offering other opportunities and ideas to those not awarded grants. Grantees appreciated foundations that took the time to know the grantee, building trust and respect and valuing what they brought to the table, so by the time you’re asked for a proposal, a short and concise one is all that is needed. 

Bad experiences and the list got longer: tedious processes that can incur costs; applications that feel like a Ph.D. thesis; requiring documents, systems and structures many small NGOs do not have; no reasoning behind requests for particular documents; moving goal posts; being set up for failure; a sense of condescension; the field visit that can feel like the funder’s representative is on holiday; a lack of transparency, including around who was awarded grants; and, not surprising, a lack of feedback regardless of disposition of the grant. Then there is funder talk about opening up the process but little shift in procedures and power dynamics.

Romain Murphy then had us articulate guiding values and not simply assume them. Given our list of good and bad practices, the values we listed were much as one would expect: integrity, authenticity, transparency, respect, mutual learning, humility, and, of course, feedback. The real question is, how does one live these values in the funding setting? Our group offered some examples. 

Bigirimana said communications like form letters need to change, because the projects and people asking for funding are not uniform. Nabimanya noted that while rejection makes people feel bad, explaining rejection can seed growth. I’m concerned about the traditional notion of using the framework of “beneficiaries” and counting heads to measure impact. Kiama agreed and noted it’s important to be aware of the inherent power dynamics of problematic terminology that plagues this sector. Looking ahead, Kiama wants to see the future of catalytic funding include consortiums, so grantees helpfully see each other as peers.

Our co-creation group landed on a two-way street where transparency and accountability are central. Offering feedback, building relationships, collaboration and sharing power, empowering and not imposing — all rose to the top. So did articulating a clear process and clear vision to quickly see if there’s alignment so no one’s time is wasted. 

A one-page application was composed of questions that were thoughtful, pointed and direct — not simplistic — with minimal requests for additional paperwork. Interviews would be an important part of the process. Romain Murphy finds exploring the origin story of the leader helpful, as is the “why” behind the commitment. A post-grant evaluation will also be required from each seed fund grantee. 

Our co-creation experience has already produced one unexpected impact. Bigirimana sought out that elusive funder feedback and learned what the problem was with Phephisa’s funding requests: They lacked audited accounts. Now, the organization is teaching one of its members Excel and accounting procedures, computer literacy and data entry with a bit of capacity-building funding. 

“Joy in watching a more participatory process unfold”

Our next step: review applications and make grants. Imago Dei’s Gender Equity Seed Fund grants will start small, between $5,000 and $15,000, to germinate innovative ideas and potential projects both new and underway among its two cohorts of fellows. For those who apply and do not receive funding, the commitment to feedback was something the co-creation committee felt strongly about. That did give the foundation’s review team pause. They felt the intent was commendable but worried it might be overwhelming. Being careful to manage expectations, the foundation was clear it would not promise to connect people to other sources of funding, but it would offer targeted feedback.

Though Romain Murphy says at this early juncture, “We are not clear how much [the seed fund] will change the reality of its grantmaking,” Imago Dei is adjusting current systems to accommodate the new fund. She believes participatory grantmaking is a step in the right direction, even gaining some traction, though the fact remains that “traditional philanthropy is hesitant to take risks and is mostly donor-driven.” Today’s “daunting” array of polycrises “urgently requires structural change,” she says. “Like Bishop Tutu said, ‘There comes a point where we need to stop pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they are falling in.’"

Nielsen Jones is enthusiastic. With the conclusion of this phase of planning, she says, “Mixing up how you give, to experiment with more proximate approaches like this seed fund, can yield many unforeseen dividends, including a deeper sense of trust and real partnership within your ecosystem, an opportunity for personal growth as you let go of some control, and joy in watching a more participatory process unfold.”

Which made me think back to something Esperande Bigirimana had said to me. “You may be alone, but if you turn on your light, others will come.” 

Susan K. Barnett is a former award-winning investigative journalist with the network newsmagazines PrimeTime Live, 20/20 (ABC News) and Dateline NBC. She leads Cause Communications and the multifaith advocacy project Faiths for Safe Water.